Lost And Found

Matthew Jensen is a conceptual landscape artist who lives in Brooklyn and walks all over the place. One day a couple of years ago, he was going down a trail in Highbridge Park, in far uptown Manhattan, when he passed a toppled elm tree. There were a lot of downed trees in the city back then, most of them the victims of the terrible wind “downburst” that crossed Manhattan and the Bronx in August of 2009. The elm was huge, one of the oldest in the city; it reminded him of a dead elephant. As Jensen walks, he always keeps his eyes on the ground. He has found many amazing things, and he knows that among the roots of upturned trees is a good place to look.

Jensen is thirty-one years old, slim, long-legged, and dark-haired, and his eyes have a special brightness that comes from use. Standing in the cavity where the tree had been, he trained his eyes on the uplifted roots and dirt. At first, he saw nothing, which didn’t bother him. He enjoys looking hard at nothing and believes it is a skill, a meditative state, which artists should cultivate. After a number of Zen-like minutes, he registered a fleck of red among some thin root tendrils. Reaching up, he took the fleck between his thumb and forefinger. It was a bead. A tendril had grown through its middle. Leaning in closer, he saw others, red and white and yellow and blue. He picked them from the tendrils like fruit. Each measured about a sixteenth of an inch across, and there were more than sixty of them. He had found a cache of glass beads probably dating from Manhattan’s fur-trade days, two hundred and fifty or three hundred years ago. Though surrounded by forest, he was close enough to pavement that a good run and a jump could have landed him on Dyckman Street, and he was almost excited enough to do that.

Ask Jensen if he is a photographer and he sidles around the question, conceding only that much of his work is “photo-based.” He doesn’t want people to get too caught up in the visual image, nor is he interested in pretty images. He wants to recover the “Whoa!” reaction humans had the very first time they looked at, say, a lithograph of the Pyramids. The jolt he is after precludes the possibility of kitsch, a chronic hazard of landscapes. On airplanes he always sits in a window seat, and when the passengers are told to lower the shades he drapes a blanket around his window and puts his head under it and continues to look. The landscapes he has done—two hundred and fifty-four photos of decorative landscape stones in his home town of Killingly, Connecticut; a hundred and forty-five photos of leftover snow piles in early springtime in Nebraska City, Nebraska—have that same focus and inventiveness. Recently, the Metropolitan Museum purchased “The 49 States,” a series of American landscapes that he constructed using Google Maps Street View images and Photoshop. In October, the museum will exhibit the work in a group show.

One Saturday in June, an admirer of Jensen’s joined him for a walk uptown. They saw the downed elm, and the little beach on the Harlem River where he found his first bead—a cobalt-blue one, of Murano glass—and discovered several more beads in sand and gravel that recent rains had washed along park paths. “Manhattan was a center of the fur trade for a long time, and beads were a main trade item,” he said, over lunch at the Indian Road Café, in Inwood. “But I think there must have been a moment when Indians suddenly realized that beads were basically worth nothing, and they’d been trading all this valuable stuff for them. I can see them just tossing out the beads in disgust. That’s probably why you can still find so many of them—they’re money that became valueless.” Then he took out a little box of some of the other items he has found: a piece of saltglaze pottery with a hunting scene; several money cowries (seashells used by Indians as currency); some tiny red seed beads on a thin wire; a little porcelain doll called a Frozen Charlotte, which was a bath toy of the nineteenth century; and a strange egg-shaped rubber object honeycombed with holes, which mystified him. Finally, he unwrapped his best find. It was a white clay pipe, unbroken, that he had come upon half buried near a park trail in Riverdale. Clay-pipe fragments are relatively common, but whole pipes are not. Markings indicated that it was made in Glasgow, in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. “You didn’t throw clay pipes out until they broke,” Jensen said. “I think whoever was smoking this forgot it and never went back for it. And look”—at the base of the stem were irregular tooth marks. Suddenly, the face of the snaggletoothed smoker seemed to materialize, the café faded out, and a landscape of old New York sprang up magically all around. ♦